The Ford and Carter administrations prohibited the reprocessing of old nuclear-fuel rods, due in part to fears of weapons proliferation. While the Reagan administration lifted the ban, the U.S. has not yet engaged in reprocessing.
The process separates usable uranium that can go back into nuclear power plants, but it also creates byproducts, such as plutonium, which can be used for weapons.
John Grossenbacher, director of Idaho National Laboratory, said technology is under development that will help counter proliferation concerns.
"We're going to reprocess used nuclear fuel, but we're going to use advanced technologies," he said.
These new technologies would help support the proposed Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) program, which calls for the development of new ways to reprocess spent nuclear fuel.
Experts want to recover usable uranium while lumping the plutonium with other materials that would be too radioactive to steal. That waste would then be burned in special reactors, called fast reactors, which is another part of GNEP program.
The Department of Energy has called for the development of advanced fast reactors for burning the plutonium-laced nuclear waste from reprocessing plants.
England, France, Russia and Japan have active programs to recycle spent nuclear fuel, which produce new fuel rods for nuclear power plants. But none of them is known to be using fast reactors to burn reprocessed waste.
For now the U.S. follows the once-through cycle, which sends used fuel rods into storage. In recent years, rule changes have opened the door to recycling the nation's spent fuel rods.
Grossenbacher said recycling nuclear fuel would create waste products, some of which are less hazardous than normal spent fuel rods. The less-hazardous waste products would not have to be stored deep underground, but the process still produces some waste that would need a permanent repository.
Producing less of the highest-level waste through reprocessing could help eliminate the need for a second Yucca Mountain-type facility, the Nevada site targeted for permanent storage of nuclear waste.
A recent report from the Keystone Center, a nonprofit policy group, indicated that reprocessing would increase the amount of low- and intermediate-level waste that would need long-term storage. The Union of Concerned Scientists is also not yet sold on the idea of reprocessing spent nuclear fuel.
"This is really dangerous and tends to produce more plutonium," said Jon Block, a nuclear expert with the nonprofit group.
Only a few fast reactors are now operating in the world; none in the U.S., which critics say indicates that these reactors are more difficult to operate than traditional nuclear power plants.
Vanessa Pierce, head of HEAL Utah, a watchdog group that monitors nuclear issues, said some experts believe there would have to be many fast reactors to make a difference. It is unclear how many times that waste would have to be burned before the plutonium is eliminated.
"Reprocessing will never eliminate high-level waste," she said.
There is also the question of economics, since reprocessing is far more expensive than mining new uranium. Pierce said prices of uranium would have to skyrocket even further to make reprocessing economically viable.
If the government is convinced that expanding the nation's nuclear power base is the right way to go to help curb global warming, watchdog groups are pushing to maintain the existing once-through fuel cycle practices.
glavine@sltrib.com
